It's good to be bad: The guilty pleasure of playing the villain

Last year's excellent stealth-action game Dishonored featured a host of interesting characters, but few were as compelling as Daud, voiced by screen actor Michael Madsen. Normally a totally unshakeable master assassin, always willing to take on any job, his murder of the Empress in the game's opening moments ends up haunting him.

After Dunwall City Trials, Dishonored's first downloadable content that offers a collection of time trials, stealth trials, and other self-contained tests of skill, we now have The Knife of Dunwall, its first story-driven DLC. Instead of the main game's silent protagonist Corvo, players take on the role of Daud, starting with the Empress's death, and then running parallel to the main story.

Daud, one of the villains of Dishonored, is the playable character in the new story-based DLC.

Sure enough, Daud is wracked by guilt and uncertainty, and the mysterious god-like being known as the Outsider, who grants Corvo and Daud their magical powers, materialises in order to tell Daud that he is doomed. The events he has set in motion will lead inevitably to his death, but he does at least have the chance to achieve some degree of atonement, and perhaps die with less of a stain on his soul.

The Outsider's cryptic clues lead Daud to new, previously unseen parts of the city of Dunwall, where he follows a chain of strange leads through a whale slaughtering factory, the city streets, and finally back to his base in the Flooded District.

There was never any doubt in Dungeon Keeper that you were definitely the bad guys.

Playing through the first mission of The Knife of Dunwall, I was reminded of just how fun it can be to play the bad guy from time to time. It is especially enjoyable in this case because Daud is such a multifaceted character, a man with his own twisted morality and ethics rather than a cardboard cut-out villain. He long ago learned to rationalise what he does for a living, which is why the regret he feels for the Empress is so out of character.

Thinking back, the first time I can recall having the chance to join the dark side was in LucasArts' TIE Fighter, a sequel to the popular Star Wars space combat simulator X-Wing. Not only did players get to fly Imperial ships, but the mission briefings gave a taste of what it's like to be a true believer in the righteousness of the Galactic Empire.

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I can still remember the first time I blew an X-wing fighter into atoms and feeling an odd mix of shame and elation. I was the baddie, I'd just killed one of the goodies... and it felt kind of satisfying.

Possibly the archetypal bad guy game was released a few years later. Dungeon Keeper, from Peter Molyneux's Bullfrog Games, did not present a nuanced or multifaceted villain that players could sympathise with. Instead, it gave us an over-the-top, black-hearted demonic warlord who conquered kingdoms and wiped out heroes because of his hatred for goodness.

It was lucky that Dungeon Keeper maintained such a tongue-in-cheek tone, as some of the things you would get up to were monstrous. Captured heroes could be locked up in prison until they starved to death and were revived as skeletons, or they could have their spirits broken in your torture chamber until they joined your side.

Perhaps my favourite element of the game were the level introductions, in which your mentor (voiced with delicious glee by British actor Richard Ridings) would describe the land you are about the conquer. His deep, velvety voice would twist with disgust as he talked about the kind and just rulers who never torture their subjects ("...for some reason!") and the green meadows full of cute bunnies. After winning, he would then describe how much better the place was now that everyone was dead or enslaved and the streets were running with blood.

Imagine my joy when it was revealed that War for the Overworld, a Kickstarter-funded game that purports to be the "spiritual successor" to Dungeon Keeper, would also feature Ridings on voiceovers. Considering that Molyneux himself has endorsed War for the Overworld, it looks set to be something very special.

Over to you, readers. Have you ever enjoyed playing as the bad guy? Tell us about all of your favourite villainous games in the comments below.